"The garrison of the Winter Palace originally consisted of about 2,000 all told, including detachments from yunker and ensign schools, three squadrons of Cossacks, a company of volunteers and a company from the Women's Battalion.

The garrison had dwindled owing to desertions, for there were no provisions and it had been practically starved for two days. There was no strong man to take command and to enforce discipline. No one had any stomach for fighting; and some of the ensigns even borrowed great coats of soldier pattern from the women to enable them to escape unobserved.

The greater part of the yunkers of the Mikhail Artillery School returned to their school, taking with them four out of their six guns. Then the Cossacks left, declaring themselves opposed to bloodshed! At 10 p.m. a large part of the ensigns left, leaving few defenders except the ensigns of the Engineering School and the company of women."[citation needed]

In 1921 Knox published his memoirs, With the Russian Army: 1914-1917. In this book he also tells the story of heroine Elsa Brändström.

^"...General Alfred Knox MP, who in 1919 had been Churchill's special representative at the headquarters of Admiral Kolchak and who still regarded the anticommunist fight as his special vocation". Markku Ruotsila Churchill and Finland: A Study in Anticommunism and Geopolitics. London ; Frank Cass, 2005. ISBN 0415349710 (p. 92)